Helen Gym of Parents United for Public Education in Philadelphia writes here:
Dear Friends:
On the day of the SRC vote to close down a historic and unprecedented number of schools, I’m hoping you’ll join (or send your support for) PCAPs, Parents United, the PFT and others in a large rally at 440 at 4 p.m. today. The school closings are just the tip of the iceberg in what we expect will be both a rapid and massive spiral of disinvestment (even more so than before) in our public schools and in our neighborhoods and communities. If you read the teachers contract proposal,you know that this will impact every single classroom, teacher and student, whether you’re in the poorest of schools, the most overcrowded, magnet schools or struggling neighborhood high school.
I wrote in the Notebook today, that the problems facing Philadelphia public schools have as much to do with a lack of vision for public schools today as it does with resources. What do we do with not only dramatically smaller populations, but also dramatically altered populations? Parents United and others have long touted alternative visions that engage communities and re-invest around schools as community anchors. No matter the results of today’s vote, we want history to remember that there were people standing up for a different vision of public education that has yet to be realized.
Read more here:
- On Facebook? Read beautiful testimonies by students, former students, advocates on what public education means: http://www.facebook.com/groups/phillyunderattack/193828627408074/?notif_t=group_activity
If you can’t access facebook, Media Mobilizing Project did work here: http://www.mediamobilizingproject.org/updates/underattack-when-there-enough
- Read Helen’s piece “Where’s the vision for public education?” at the Notebook: http://thenotebook.org/blog/135725/wheres-vision-public-education
- Read Rebecca Poyourow on why we sat in at the Mayor’s Office: “Mayor Nutter’s door”:http://parentsunitedphila.com/2013/03/06/mayor-nutters-door/
As always, I appreciate any thoughts, opinions, feedback and shares. Thanks!
Helen
Helen Gym
Parents United for Public Education
Parents United for Public Education
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If privatization ever does finally triumph, it will only be because for 70 years the public schools have been based on a social democrat vision (socialist) in which the state provides all things to all people and uses the public schools to indoctrinate the citizens. If the public schools promoted capitalism no one would be attacking them. But the entrenched social democrats leave citizens no other way to combat a failing and false philosophy of government. Pity though. Before the schools became infected with teachers who saw their mission as “social change,” it was a pretty good deal, free public education. The single most useful skill I ever learned (after reading and arithmetic) was typing, in 8th grade, in a Junior High School that was stocked with many lovely teachers and had happy students mostly. I except the gay gym teacher who affected a gruff personna, but who’s main joy in life was circulating among the boys in the showers to see their transforming bodies, a rather sad figure really, and the shop teacher who never taught, but just left the boys to set type while he listened to the baseball game on a radio in the boiler room. Leaving those aside, it was pretty good fun. But no one every said anything about correcting the social ills of the city. We learned our biology, geometry, art (weak program), and whatever else I don’t remember and were young and innocent, but most of us actually found a few things to really like, and nobody tried to turn us into little socialists. Now, I’m not so sure. Progressivism has enshrined the notion of “public” education, when in fact it is not a necessary concomitant of democracy and freedom—except as promoted by the quasi marxists who insist that public sector unions are constructive. Again, a pity though that a worthy tradition has to be sacrificed because its practitioners have been self brainwashed into thinking that “profit” and “business” are dirty and disgusting words and things, when there would BE no public sector without them.
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Nice new picture, Harlan.
The other looked like Mephistopheles.
Or maybe Nosferatu.
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Which was more accurate.
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And he’s smiling. I still don’t read the posts or I skim…..succinct Harlan succinct. I like the new pix…..you look happy, like Santa!
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Every skilled debater knows that most public policy disagreements among people come down to three things: definitions, facts, and values. Obviously if people disagree about what a word means, their discussion can go on forever yet never go anywhere so obviously there has to be some agreement there first to make sense out of a discussion. Facts at least can be proven in principal one way or another. And differences in values may never be resolved since people often just have different absolute values or interests that cannot be proved true or false in a scientific sense.
When you say that public schools teach “social democratic vision (socialist) in which the state provides all things to all people and uses the public schools to indoctrinate the citizens” and similar statements, you have pretty much made the entire discussion a muddle puddle lacking in any sense of coherence. First, what is “social democracy”, “socialism”, or for that matter “indoctrination”? Your definitions seem very peculiar since most educated people and political scientists do not equate social democracy and socialism. Socialism usually means in generally accepted discourse, the common ownership of society’s property, generally antithetical to capitalism and the right to individual property ownership, free markets, and so forth, although beyond that there is much less agreement what the term means specifically. I can assure you that as a teacher having had contacts with hundreds of teachers, I have hardly ever met a socialist by that definition, although I suppose there are some on the margin.
Social democracy’s definition in the modern sense is generally accepted to be different from socialism since it is a particular type of capitalism in which the essential features of capitalism are in place, but nevertheless there is a social value seen in greater public safety benefits and services, such as greater child care benefits of families, universal health care, unions, etc. The northern European countries are generally considered social democratic in this sense but are very capitalist none the less.
In my experience as a teacher, there are a large number of teachers who are social democratic in this sense, which in US society translates as liberal. Liberal certainly does not mean that the “state provides all things to all people” which is pretty much a meaningless statement on its face, since people generally desire contradictory things and no state or society can provide all things to all people that they want. Billionaires want to abolish unions but many workers want them, so no state or society can satisfy both. In that case, there is just a value difference.
In any case, teachers do not “indoctrinate” citizens through public schools since most are teaching subjects entirely unrelated to politics or economics in any sense and even in social studies, there are required curriculums and textbooks that show no evidence of propagandizing in favor of socialism or even social democracy; in fact quite the opposite as far as I’ve examined the evidence. No doubt an individual social studies teacher can assign independent readings which have a political slant. But if they have done so, I haven’t noticed very many doing it to qualify as “indoctrination” in an accepted sense of the word.
So in general, your definitions are distorted and your facts are wrong, so mostly we are left with a difference in values of some sort. To be honest I shudder what I think yours may be since extreme ideology comes to mind, but that is just part of diverse democratic society with different interests among people.
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Thank you for your careful reply and your focus on definitions, which surely must be part of the common ground if any communication is to take place, or even discovery of differences of values and facts. You took me with you in your analysis until you got to the Northern European countries.
Yes, they are social democracies, but not firmly capitalistic. They are burdened by excessive government costs, and excessive labor costs and thus lower productivity, and thus economic stagnation. Germany is essentially being asked to bail out Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. My hyperbolic phrasing in saying “all things to all people” is relatively easy to attack, but taken as metaphor is accurate enough. Such social democracies set out to permit their citizens to live within the safe cocoon of state provided health care, education, job placement, work rules, and eventually pensions. My belief is that that is the “change” President Obama wants to bring about in the United States.
What I claim is that the “indoctrination” (again an easy word to attack) is by example. Perhaps the entire teaching cohort across the United States thinks of itself as capitalist, and would reject any imputation of socialism and marxism, but by their accepting employment in a state run near monopoly on education they demonstrate that they are willing to exploit public ownership of the education enterprise by pushing for more funding and for defined benefit pensions and tenure and everything that goes with a socialist government sector of an economy.
You will enjoy attacking what I say next as inherently implausible. What I claim is that in general, all of public education is unconsciously socialist, and going by the posters on this blog almost uniformly anti-business and anti-profit and anti-capitalist. Yet every penny spent by public education first had to be generated in the private sector. They live off of other people’s work and imply that they have a moral right to do so because of the value they contribute to the society. That can be debated on the basis of values, of course. To keep a democracy going one really must have adequately educated citizens or they will fall victim to autocratic demagogues such as Chavez in Venezuela. I would even go so far as to say that the reelection of President Obama is prima facia evidence that the public schools have failed to teach their graduates the implications of his style of rule, based on illogic, contradictory statements, and appeals to emotional words, rather than running on sound policy on fundamental questions.
The general lack of interest of most of the posters here to their dependance on capitalist economics, and their general presumption that what they are doing is something different than business, when in fact it is in essence the public ownership of the means of production in which they are engaged, suggests to me that the actual status of public education is misunderstood by them, and you as well.
If you work in public education, you are a socialist by participation.
To adapt the signature phrase of the comic book character associated with MAD magazine, Alfred E. Newman, I see you as saying, “What, me socialist?” The poster called “Communistteacher” is quite clear and direct about his or her allegiance. Some few others probably if pressed would acknowledge explicit support for the government ownership of education. But the great mass of teachers do not profess such allegiance to having the government do the crucial producing. It is just built into the culture and to the tradition and most of us accept it as the “natural” way that society should be organized. I’m ambivalent about it all myself, but I’m not blind to the realities. To the extent that state provided education prepares its students for state provided health care, mortgage insurance, student college loans, social security insurance, and Medicare, it is indoctrination in a wide sense of the word, perhaps more metaphorical than literal.
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Harlan, as an independent that leans right, and as a teacher of 15 years (in four different schools), I have yet to see one hint of quasi Marxist/socialist, etc…
I would be the first to scream about it.
When’s the last time you even stepped foot inside a public school?
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Thank you “ME” for your heartfelt denial of explicit marxism or socialism in the four public schools in which you have taught. You must permit me a bit of skepticism about your being the first to scream about it. Academic culture is pervasively “liberal” which I equate with both conscious and unconscious socialism. See my comment to A.S.Neill above for my take on the matter. Your final question implies that were I a member of the staff of a public, let us say, high school, my observations would coincide with your own. I would like to counter with a question to which I do not require an answer.
“Have you ever taught in a school which depended for its existence not on tax funds, but on private tuition, and thus on actually more or less succeeding with every student, or customer, who crossed its threshold?”
“Have you ever taught in a school which lost 20% of its customers because of the policies and personality of its chief administrator?”
“Have you ever taught in a school which, by getting rid of its malperforming administrator, experienced an immediate recovery of that previously lost 20% of its clientele under new leadership?”
I have.
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I was there at the protest today in front of the Philadelphia School District offices with 7 other teachers from my school. It was a large crowd but not anywhere near the 12,000 in Chicago or 20,000 in Canada. Where were all the Philly teachers? In shellshock?
Randi, AFT Pres, was arrested with 18 others who made their way into the building.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/07/randi-weingarten-arrested_n_2832306.html
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How did a cry for help from Philadelphia parents and students become a debate on socialism?
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Very easily, philadelphia lisa. The people in the public schools all think that wealth in this country should be equally distributed, and extend that socialist philosophy to public schooling where they insist that all students are equally capable of being educated if only they were properly funded, taught, serviced, helped, tutored etc. The school “reformers” do not believe that every kid can be educated fully. They believe the range of potential to be developed can be described under a bell curve, and won’t spend the money asked for by the educational utopians. In fact, the public is behind the reformers because they feel they are “taxed enough already.” (Read TEA party). The schools, unfortunately, are lumped in with the bad press that the federal government gets for overspending, for borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent. The states however, cannot monetize their debt, i.e. print money. So, unless the taxpayers vote to tax themselves more to maintain public schools, and the utopians running them, there is no more money.
The only way to exterminate that false belief that every child can be educated (No Child Left Behind) if only enough money were invested, false because the need is infinite but the money isn’t, is to destroy the public schools so the people who base their appeal not on reality but on a utopian wish will be out of jobs and practical, feasible education transferred back to the parents through charters and vouchers.
The kids are the real victims here, caught between the capitalists (realists) and the socialists (utopian visionaries). The parents advocating for the public schools do not understand whom they are supporting. They just know that their favorite neighborhood school is being shut down. The kids and their families are the victims of a fundamental clash of philosophies about government. The public school teachers think they can correct the child abuse of one parent families, the child abuse of impoverished families, the child abuse of ignorant parents and families, and the child abuse of reckless families. The kids aren’t to blame, but their environment is, and the environment is the people around them.
The dispute is what to do about the poor and it carries over into what to do about educating the poor. Certainly, in America we want every one to have an equal chance, but as long as children are born into “bad” families, the starting line is never the same for everyone, and it would take infinite money to make everyone equal. This clash of philosophies about what “equal opportunity” means is as intense as that between Muslims and Hindus in India. Both sides are intransigent, refusing to tolerate the partial truth of the other side. The innocent students and their parents get caught in the middle.
If you could fix families (the disease) by treating their children (the symptoms), Head Start would work better than it does. If what we want is thinking people, and if thinking is defined by successful school work, and if the ability to do successful school work could be influenced by early childhood education, then the advantage given to kids in Head Start would not vanish after 3rd grade. Family culture is a good deal more powerful than schooling because learning the habits of the culture is necessary for infant survival. There are always talented people everywhere, and we need to continue universal educational opportunity so we can find those people, but the hope that everyone could be rich if only the exploiters didn’t steal the fruits of their work and the hope that everyone can get educated if only they are provided with enough good nutrition, good health care, economic security, and supportive parenting, is probably futile. Economic assumptions are the same as educational assumptions, Lisa. That’s how we get from parents crying out for help in Philadelphia to socialists crying out that government can fix everything in nature.
If education in this country had not been contaminated by progressivism for 70 years there might be some hope. As it is, the damage has been done and can’t be reversed except by nuking the public school systems. Public school supporters are like the Shia in Iran; they actually think that the 12 Imam will appear. Won’t happen. In the mean time they will destroy many, many lives with their holy thoughts about the true good of human beings.
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Helen,
Would you be interested in attending this meeting:
Parents, administration, and staff at the John Hancock Demonstration School, 3700 Morrell Avenue, in Northeast Philadelphia will meet tomorrow night, Tuesday, April 30th at 6:00 PM in the school cafeteria, to discuss the devastating impact of the Philadelphia School District’s proposed budget cuts for the 2013-2014 school year. We are mobilizing into action to prevent the budget from passing with the proposed drastic elimination of essential services.
Thanks,
Stacy Schwab
schweggs@aol.com
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